Spring Into Quant Finance Review

It's 5 days long, each day consisting of a series of workshops and/or social activities. The workshops included sessions on finance, statistics, machine learning, and programming. These all correspond to aspects of a quant researcher's job. The social activities included cooking class, hiking, tours (segway, boat, ...), and more. There was also a lot of socializing, networking, talking to current GR employees, and even the CEO and Head of Research!

I didn't come in with a finance background and knew very little about how ML could be applied in finance, so I've definitely appreciated learning about that. We also developed a basic trading strategy during the Statistics session, which was fun and insightful as it resembles what they do on a daily basis as a hedge fund: trying to find market inefficiencies and come up with strategies accordingly. It's very stimulating intellectually.

Very helpful. "Trader", "Software Engineer", "Quantitative Trader" and "Quantitative Researcher" mean different things at different companies -- GR seems 'pure' to these titles in that a trader just trades, whereas at other companies they might also develop strategies, et cetera. We got a talk from the CEO, about the views and values of G-Research, which was awesome, and also from the recruiters and head of research about what the different roles entail.

Surprisingly relaxing. For such a big company where an absolutely massive amount of money is at stake every minute, people are pretty relaxed and nice. There is definitely a very academic vibe, with many people actually joining GR straight from academia. New employees seem to be given a lot of time and training to learn about previous and current strategies, implying GR prefers long-term employees over short-term burn-outs.

I loved it and would do it again in a heartbeat. I've met a lot of wonderful and very smart people from all over the world. Many people that do the same type of research, many that work in totally different fields. It is an exhausting week, though -- many social activities, lots of fun, lots of work.

Yes

Have fun with it. The puzzles they throw at you are genuinely fun to most people working at and applying to GR. If you hate them, there's probably no point in applying. A quantitative background is also necessary, although it doesn't matter whether it's physics, applied or pure math, CS, etc. I've seen all at the SiQF week! Also, prepare well for the online test: it's definitely non-trivial, but doable.